Gutsy Upgrade – XGL Problems

I’ve begun the process of upgrading the many Ubuntu installations I manage to the recently released Gutsy Gibbon. The first upgrade was flawless, though it took a long time as the servers were pretty busy. The second installation was going fine until there was a freaking power outage in my house. Not even an outage, just a flash… not enough to turn off all the computers or reset all the clocks in the house, but it took a few out, upgrade-in-progress computer included. I wasn’t able to boot with the latest kernel, but using an older one the system was back up and running and a ‘sudo dpkg –configure -a’ completed the upgrade process without any problems!

However, machine number 3 (my laptop hard drive, currently booting on my desktop via a USB external case since my laptop is in the shop) didn’t go so well. There were some scary errors during the upgrade. A segmentation fault caused one of the packages to fail upon which a great many packages depended. Packages like adduser, passwd, cupsys, bash… Surprisingly though, the update manager survived it all!

But Gutsy Gibbon was crawling. Absolutely crawling, considering I’m running with 2.0 GB of RAM and a 3.0 GHz dual core processor (it was flying in Feisty). ‘top’ showed that the culprit was XGL, and even after disabling desktop effects there was no change.

I was quite worried at first, I didn’t want to have to do a fresh install. But I found this post in the forums with a quick fix!

touch ~/.config/xserver-xgl/disable

By disabling XGL, my computer was back to its former glory. I don’t fully understand what the problem was, but either way I don’t appear to need XGL at all (I’m still using desktop effects) for my Intel graphics card.